Contentious Repertoires

Contentious Repertoires

  • The contentious repertoire is the range of options that are available for making contentious claims.

Contentious Repertoires

What tactics precede social movements?

Collective action without movements

Examples

  • Food riots and grain seizures

  • Invasions and organized poaching

  • Destruction of gates, machinery

  • Rough music/Chivaree

  • Forced illumination

  • Mock trials

Features:

  • Emulating or co-opting authority: mock trials and effigies

  • Appeals to mediating authorities: guilds, churches, village leaders make claims not classes or identity groups

  • Celebrations and clubs as cover: parades and festivals lend plausible deniability to contention

  • Localized and direct: if you don’t like the loom, you smash it.

  • Parochial: mostly specific to a particular culture.

Early Movements

On the 16th August I went to Stockport Road about eleven or a little after, and I met a great number of persons advancing toward Manchester with all the regularity of a regiment, only they had no uniform. They were all marching in file, three abreast. They had two banners with them. There were persons by the side, acting as officers and regulating the files. The order was beautiful indeed. - Francis Phillips (Manchester Merchant; 1819)

What early movements looked like

Belgium 1800-1900

(from: Tilly, Charles, and Lesley J. Wood. Social Movements, 1768-2012. Routledge, 2015.)
Decade Meetings Demonstrations Petitions
1830s 4 2 7
1840s 0 1 3
1850s 2 0 0
1860s 1 3 0
1870s 1 11 0
1880s 0 59 0
1890s 2 57 0

Routinization of demonstrations

Many elements in the social movement repertoire are now considered entirely routine, while others are available but non-normative.

Values and norms

The modern social movement

Three features:

  1. a sustained, organized public effort of making collective claims 2 employment of combinations of the following forms of political action, the creation of associations, public meetings, vigils, rallies, demonstrations, petition drives, statements to and in public media and pamphleteering;
  2. public representations of WUNC: worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment

WUNC Displays

“We are many, we are worthy and unjustly disadvantaged, we agree among ourselves, we are committed, disciplined and legal.” - Tilly 1994

  • WUNC displays are a defining feature of social movements

  • They operate by generating sympathy/support from other members of the public, rather than through direct actions. Symbolism is central.

Worthiness

Neat clothing, calm demeanor, emphasis on respectability or social status (mothers, clergy, soldiers)

Mothers of the Plaza De Mayo protest in Argentina

Unity

Uniform clothing or banners, coordinated chants or songs

Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement protest

Numbers

Large crowd sizes, petitions with lots of signatures, social media activity

Women’s March (and Trump inauguration crowd)

Commitment

Lunch counter sit in at Woolworth’s in Mississippi

Diversity(?)

Movements often act to encourage the perception of diversity, and this plays a role in generating public support

Bailey, Erica R., et al. “How Tilly’s WUNC works: Bystander evaluations of social movement signals lead to mobilization.” American Journal of Sociology 128.4 (2023): 1206-1262.

Bailey, Erica R., et al. “How Tilly’s WUNC works: Bystander evaluations of social movement signals lead to mobilization.” American Journal of Sociology 128.4 (2023): 1206-1262.

Some research on repertoire change and influence

Tactical Diffusion

Tactical Diffusion

  • 1985-1990: Students at 46 different universities erected “Shantytowns” to protest South African Apartheid or demand university divestment

  • Rapid spread without direct coordination.

Tactical Diffusion

Potential routes for diffusion:

  • Direct: tactical spread through direct interactions (like a coordinating committee)

  • Indirect/Non-relational: spread through indirect linkages of shared identity or culture (if I see people like me doing something, I’ll also do it myself)

Tactical Diffusion of Shantytowns

  • Data: All four-year, nondenominational, non-specialty, nonprofessional colleges and universities in the US that had some form of investment in South Africa

  • Dependent Variable: in each year, has college \(n\) had a shantytown protest? (ultimately, the outcome to be measured is the probability of having a shantytown protest by time \(t\)

  • Independent Variable(s):

    • Characteristics of individual colleges (propensity)
    • Similarities between universities without/without a shantytown at time \(t\) (proximity)
Hypothetical data
University Time Has shantytown? University-specific variables (ex: 1985 enrollment) “Proximity” (ex: % with same prestige level)
A 1985 No 35,000 1%
A 1986 No 35,000 10%
A 1987 Yes 35,000 20%
B 1985 Yes 12,000 5%

Diffusion of Shantytowns

  • These data are right-censored (some actors never had a protest) so the author uses a regression model known as an event-history regression, which can account for this condition.

Diffusion of Shantytowns

Tactical Diffusion through collaboration

  • In a 2012 paper, David Wang and Sarah Soule look at the effects of collaboration on the spread of tactics using the dynamics of collective action data

  • They find that when two SMOs participate in events together, they are more likely to borrow tactics from one another in later protests.

The DOCA network

Tactical Diffusion through collaboration